A Quick Lesson in Data Reliability

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A favorite math author of mine, Alex Bellos, writes a math puzzle article for the Guardian. This week, his puzzle provides a simple lesson on a method for determining if data has been compromised. Here is a link to his article: "Can you solve it? The magical maths that keeps your data safe."

Cicada Fest 2024

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This spring and summer there will be an emergence of cicadas in much of the southeastern and midwestern states in the United States. This emergence is unusual as it is the convergence of two cicada broods - one which hibernates 13 years underground and another that hibernates 17 years. The last time both broods emerge in the same year was 1803.

It is not a coincidence that hibernation period of both broods are prime numbers. Having a period of a prime number of years helps reduce the possibility that a predator will have an overlapping period.

Update 4/17/2024: My home state of Illinois is the center of the convergence of the two cicadas broods emerging this year: https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/cicada-maps-illinois-2024/.

Why Math is Important

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I was recently stunned by a recent internet headline which stated "Buckle up, this viral cow maths puzzle has truly fried everyone’s brains." I knew this was likely just click bait, but I checked it out in case there was a good lesson. Here is the link to the "viral" problem: https://thetab.com/uk/2024/02/20/buckle-up-this-viral-cow-maths-puzzle-has-truly-fried-everyones-brains-353769.

If you don't want to go to the site it stated "I bought a cow for $800; I sold it for $1000; I bought it again for $1000; I sold it again for $1300. How much did I earn?"

As you probably did in your head, I summed: -800+1000-1100+1300=400. The range of answers included $100 - $1500. 

Sometimes such problems have a trick, but I thought this was a straight-forward problem. I believe the only reason this may have been somewhat viral, is that there are too many people who are very uncomfortable with math. My opinion is that this problem on the internet got popular only because many people are uncomfortable performing some basic calculations. Math is important because people need to have confidence in performing calculations to evaluate everyday situations.

IBM's 100th Anniversary

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The company, International Business Machines or IBM, was founded in the 1800s. However, it was first known as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, or CTR. It was in 1924 that the company changed its name to IBM. IEEE Spectrum has a good article about this period of time in the early computing history: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ibm-history.